National Endowment for the Humanities Award

Edward Cohn, assistant professor of history, will receive a summer stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities for his book-length project, “Policing Practices and the KGB’s Struggle with Dissent in the Baltic States, 1953–91.”

“From Joseph Stalin’s 1953 death to the USSR’s 1991 collapse, the KGB subjected hundreds of thousands of minor political offenders to a tactic called profilaktika (prophylaxis), ‘inviting’ them to the KGB’s offices for a so-called ‘chat,’ intimidating them into confessing, and releasing them when they promised to reform,” Cohn says.

His project is a book-length study of profilaktika in the USSR’s Baltic republics, where opposition to Soviet Communism was strongest.